Letters by a modern St. Ferdinand III about cults

Plenty of cults exist - every cult has its 'religious dogma', its idols, its 'prophets', its 'science', its 'proof' and its intolerant liturgy of demands. Cults everywhere: Islam, the State, the cult of Gay and Queer, Marxism, Darwin and Evolution, 'Science', Globaloneywarming, Changing Climate, Abortion....a nice variety for the human-hater, amoral, anti-rationalist to choose from. It is so much fun mocking them isn't it ?

Tuesday, February 01, 2011

The failure of Arab National Socialism.

The Bush doctrine - much derided - was right.

by StFerdIII

We see the moderate elements in Egypt revolting for a very good and simple reason: socialism in any form always fails. This is simply a truism. We can hide the failure. We can rationalize it. We can fantasize about the failure's magnificent existential potential and properties. We can feed it, cuddle it, and protect it. But at some point in the long march of time, the socialist beast in question will perish. It always does. In this light the demise of Arab Socialism is all too obvious. But this destruction of unnatural Arab socialism presents a great opportunity to bring Egypt and Tunisia into the patterns of the modern world economy, and to marginalize the radical forces which are pilloring Arab and Muslim society.

One of the main factors in the general Arab uprising in North Africa and Yemen, is the complete national socialization of much of that area of the world. Arab national socialism, a fact since the rise of Nasser, including state control [statism] married with some form of hyper-sensitive nationalism, should be anathema to both modern Western Liberals and Conservatives alike. The socialism of Egypt's Mubarak mirrors that of other nationalized statist entities including those which arose in Germany, Russia, Gandhi's India, Venezuela, China [even today] and North Korea. Economic autarchy, including the state control of capital, investments and limited trade ensures a general poverty of wealth creation, job availability and capital available for modernization. It denies natural law and individual rights, and militates against the better instincts of a population which does not want to be ruled either by an elite hiding in their Versailles-like palaces; nor by ideological fundamentalists who want to merge church and state and micro-manage every ritual and thought in the life of its subjects.

Further national socialism leads ineluctably to forms of 'nationalist' intolerance, and the seeking out of being 'different' than your neighbours and competitors. In this vein, Egypt has developed since the failed attempt of Nasser's pan-Arab empire, a story-line about its signficiance and dominance within the Arab world, and of its utter importance in all matters to do with Sunni Islam and pan-Arab aspirations. National myths are legion with Egypt, distorting reality and limiting debate and dialogue. Thus we see that racism and supremacism not only exist under the divine-right regime of Mubarak, they tend to thrive. Anti-semitic comments from Arab media and Muslim Imams are common within Egypt – a country where every public word is scoured and censored. Coptic Christians who number 13 million are regularly pilloried and attacked, if not murdered and brutalized, and the Egyptian state does nothing to protect them. Better to have the 'mobs' attacking non-Arab, non-Muslim targets as in Hitler's national socialized Germany, or the Jew-hating epoch of Stalin's Russian chauvinism, than to turn their energies against the state.

Historically countries which pursue the extremist ends of a national-socialist state always end up with the following characteristics:

-Bankrupted autarchic economic systems.

-Stagnated political-economies which breed extremism.

-State sanctioned forms of racism, supremacism and violence against 'others'.

Egypt for example has a per capita GDP which has not grown much in almost 50 years. 40% of its women are illiterate accoding to the UN. Its education is suffused with Sunni Islamic orthodoxy itself teaching racism and the joys of the universal Umma. Negative stereotypes of the West and Israel are common throughout the width and breadth of Egyptian society and media [see Memri.org which has great archives of this fact].

Arab despots and pharaohs of the modern age such as Mubarak, are in reality not our 'allies' or 'friends'. National socialist regimes are not the natural allies of anyone. As long as the US pays off Mubarak with $1.5 billion a year in part not to attack Israel, the Pharaonic autocrat is 'your friend', if bribery constitutes a fast alliance. But this bribery of Mubarak, not to launch another racist inspired attack on the democratic state of Israel and thereby disrupting oil supplies, Suez trade and spiking commoditiy prices as markets fall and wipe out Trillions in wealth; is a very tenuous accord. Instead of modernizing the Egyptian political-economy which will initiate more wealth and jobs, and thereby quell the more excitable dissidents within Egyptian society; the autocratic regime can instead do nothing except plunder its people, tax the Suez canal trade routes and force the Americans to write more cheques. At some point the ally becomes an opponent. This moment is reached when the people of the satrapy demand change. If we don't respond well to this general uprising we will actually form more radicalized Egyptians. If we don't push for some variety of secularism, job creation and constitutional division of powers within Egypt and Tunisia, we will make it easier for the Islamic fascist organizations to enhance their power.

Yet Mr. Mubarak's police state actually drove many Egyptians into the arms of the radicals. It is no coincidence that al Qaeda started as primarily an Egyptian-Saudi organization run by citizens of two of our closest and most repressive allies. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda's No. 2, was radicalized as a boy in Egypt and then all the more so after spending three years being tortured in Mr. Mubarak's dungeons in the 1980s.

Mr. Mubarak's downfall could well be a good thing in the long run if it opens up Egypt's closed political and economic systems to greater dynamism and debate, so that in the future frustrated young Egyptians can find peaceful expression rather than strapping on a suicide vest. Yet we should be realistic about the short-term costs of a new regime in a country that has been subjected to decades of anti-Western and anti-Israeli propaganda by Mr. Mubarak—and where many blame us (with some justification) for inflicting Mr. Mubarak on them. A government that better reflects the will of the people will be less willing to cut deals with the U.S. or Israel.

Mr. Boot is right – we must be realistic. A country such as Egypt which has been steeped in some 60 years of rabid anti-Jew, anti-American vitriol, will not over a long weekend become a fastidiously well-mannered Oxford campus, full of rational, earnest and non-violent debate. But we have to start somewhere. Mubarak and his ilk across the Arab world are finished. It is just a matter of time. We need smart policies backed up by force, economic agreements and political will to steer Egypt and other states towards pluralism and representative government which protects minorities and turns down the volume on national-socialist hate and racism. If we accomplish that over the coming years than these Arab uprisings will be seen as a positive turning point in the history of the region.